Starting the Year on a Positive Note
Back in May, I asked readers to think of five things they'd done well over the last school year. I followed it up with a post on my personal blog reflecting on what I thought I did well. Now it's time for the school year to rev up again, and I'm hoping to not only keep doing what I did well, but also set some goals for the coming year. As this blog is a tech integration blog, I want you to think about something you want to do better or something new you want to try this year. With the proliferation of Web 2.0 tool lists, blogs about successes teachers have had with particular endeavors, webinars, wikis, online communities and more, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. Don't Try to Be a Superhero Pick one new tool or site to try with your students during the first report period (making sure, of course, that it fits nicely with what you will be teaching). Some Ideas for Implementation see more see less
Writer’s Digest - Writing Prompts
Write a scene that includes a character speaking a different language, speaking in a thick accent, or otherwise speaking in a way that is unintelligibe to the other characters. (Note: You don't necessarily need to know the language the character is speaking—be creative with it!) Describe a character's reaction to something without explaining what it is. Write a story or a scene about one character playing a prank on another. Writing Prompt: Write a story that involves confusion over homonyms (words that have the same spelling but different meanings) or homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently). For World Storytelling Day, share the best story you've ever heard or told by word of mouth, or have a fictional character recount their favorite story. You're making your way down a cobbled street when a stocky, red-bearded man beckons you into an alley. Pick an item from each column in the chart to create a simile.
Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. - Gapminder.org
3 Great Tools for Collaborative Brainstorming
Collaboration is an essential feature of the 21st century education. Students are encouraged to work together and benefit from their collective wisdom.There are several ways teachers can use to foster collaborative habits among their students and most important of them all is through group work or classroom group projects. While working together, students get to discover different ways of thinking other than theirs and they also share and build a healthy learning environment. Working together on projects does require pulling ideas from different resources and this is probably one of the problematic things about collaborative brainstorming. 1- Real Time Board This is a web tool I have already reviewed in an earlier post here in this blog. 2- Lucid Chart This is another awesome web tool that students can use for collaborative brainstorming. 3- Spider Scribe SpiderScribe is an online mind mapping and brainstorming tool.
25 Things You Should Know About Word Choice
1. A Series Of Word Choices Here’s why this matters: because both writing and storytelling comprise, at the most basic level, a series of word choices. Words are the building blocks of what we do. They are the atoms of our elements. 2. Words are like LEGO bricks: the more we add, the more we define the reality of our playset. 3. You know that game — “Oh, you’re cold, colder, colder — oh! 4. Think of it like a different game, perhaps: you’re trying to say as much as possible with as few words as you can muster. 5. Finding the perfect word is as likely as finding a downy-soft unicorn with a pearlescent horn riding a skateboard made from the bones of your many enemies. 6. For every right word, you have an infinity of wrong ones. 7. You might use a word that either oversteps or fails to meet the idea you hope to present. 8. Remember how I said earlier that words are like LEGO, blah blah blah help define reality yadda yadda poop noise? 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Am. 15. No, really. 16. 17. 18.
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EduClipper Launches Its “Pinterest For Education”
Back in 2007, Adam Bellow launched a site called eduTecher to aggregate and surface the best educational resources and content on the web. A high school teacher, Bellow set out to highlight new technologies and educational tools that could be used in the classroom to improve the learning experience. When a new generation of community curation tools began to take hold on the web, like Pinterest, Bellow decided to leverage the increasing popularity of crowdsourced curation to take eduTecher to the next level. This week the teacher-turned-entrepreneur officially launched eduClipper, a platform that allows teachers and students to explore, share and contribute to a library of educational content. The idea behind eduClipper, Bellow says, is to give students the same power of social curation they would have with Pinterest, allowing them to locate and publicly broadcast the best learning resources. For more, find eduClipper at home here.
10 Rules for Students and Teachers (and Life) by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent
by Maria Popova “Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.” Buried in various corners of the web is a beautiful and poignant list titled Some Rules for Students and Teachers, attributed to John Cage, who passed away twenty years ago this week. The list, however, originates from celebrated artist and educator Sister Corita Kent and was created as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968. It was subsequently appropriated as the official art department rules at the college of LA’s Immaculate Heart Convent, her alma mater, but was commonly popularized by Cage, whom the tenth rule cites directly. RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.
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